The Open Access Citation Advantage: Does It Exist and What Does It Mean for Libraries?

Colby Lil Lewis

Abstract

The last literature review of research on the existence of an Open Access Citation Advantage (OACA) was published in 2011 by Philip M. Davis and William H. Walters. This paper reexamines the conclusions reached by Davis and Walters by providing a critical review of OACA literature that has been published 2011, and explores how increases in OA publication trends could serve as a leveraging tool for libraries against the high costs of journal subscriptions.

David Crotty, “When Bad Science Wins, or ‘I’ll See It When I Believe It’,” Scholarly Kitchen, August 31, 2016, https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/08/31/when-bad-science-wins-or-ill-see-it-when-i-believe-it/.

Top-Level Domain (TLD) refers to the last string of letters in an internet domain name (i.e., the TLD of www.google.com is .com). For more information on TLDs, see Tim Fisher, “Top-Level Domain (TLD),” Lifewire, July 30, 2017, https://www.lifewire.com/top-level-domain-tld-2626029. For a full list of TLDs, see “List of Top-Level Domains,” Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, last updated September 13, 2018, https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/tlds-2012-02-25-en.

Crotty, “When Bad Science Wins.”

Hersh and Plume, “Citation Metrics and Open Access: What Do We Know?,” Elsevier Connect, September 14, 2016, https://www.elsevier.com/connect/citation-metrics-and-open-access-what-do-we-know.

Tang et al., “Open Access Increases Citations,” 7. Tang et al. list the following as examples of the “numerous studies” as quoted above, which I did not include in the quote for the purpose of brevity: (Antelman 2004, Hajjem et al. 2005, Eysenbach 2006, Evans and Reimer 2009, Calver and Bradley 2010, Riera and Aibar 2013, Clements 2017).